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Repairing bad sectors in an external drive (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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So I have this external 2.5" drive salvaged from an old laptop of mine. I was trying to use it to backup/store data but the transfer to the drive fails repeatedly at the ~290GB mark leading me to believe that maybe there is a bad sector on the drive. I tried to inspect the drive using smartmontools and smartctl but since it is an external drive, i was not allowed to do so. Is there anyway for me to inspect and fix this drive? I am on fedora ublue-main. The HDD is a 1TB seagate drive.

Edit : I am a linux noob so some hand holding will be appreciated. Also i am looking to use this drive only for low priority media files which i dont mind losing so please help even though it is not the greatest idea to use a failing drive

Edit 2 : It seems my post is not clear of what i am doing. I dont want to recover data from the drive. I want to try to use more of the drive for storing data

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[-] Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 months ago

thanks for the help but i am unfortunately getting a Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command error for that particular drive. A different external drive also in an enclosure returns the appropriate information. I used the smartctl --scan command to find out the device types in both cases (both are sat)

[-] _thebrain_@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago

Can you plug the drive in directly and test it? You might also just have a dead drive. Either way if you were planning on using it as a backup medium I would tell you it's probably not a good idea. If you are trying to recover data from it, good luck. Is it making any sound? You could try buying the same, old but good hard drive and swapping the control board on it. You may also have to swap the nvram chip on it to make sure you have the same sector mappings. Either way there is a lot of stuff you can try, but hopefully this is an educational experience for you (as in learning how to recover a dead drive, not as in learning about the need for proper backup methods) as opposed to a desperate attempt to recover data that is most likely unrecoverable.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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